1 Introduction

In the history of Western philosophy and theology, almost no other concept is quite as central a topic as faith, both from religious and non-religious perspectives—nor has such a complex set of meanings. There are many reasons for this, two factors of which can be mentioned here. First and foremost, faith was of essential importance both for religion as well as for human beings in Western perceptions. This is reflected by the religious scholar and Islamicist Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), who notes in his famous work Faith and Belief (1979): “Faith, the historian reports, is the fundamental religious category; even, the fundamental human category. The theologian—Christian, Islamic, or other—may hardly dissent.”¹ This reason is also directly linked to the second factor, namely, that the conceptual genesis of “faith” in the Judeo-Christian tradition is closely connected with the inner intertwining and fusion of theology and philosophy in the history of concepts.

In the following, an overview of the complex significance of the concept of faith in the European history of ideas is given. This conceptual history begins with pre-Christian ancient philosophy and the Greek word pistis (πίστις) and then moves on to the biblical terminology of the Old and New Testaments. Against the background of the specifically Christian use of language in the New Testament, it continues by analyzing the use of the concept of faith in the Early Church and in scholasticism. It then briefly describes how the concept of faith experienced a change in Martin Luther’s Reformation and how this change brought about a further contribution to the Enlightenment. Subsequently it will be demonstrated how Christian dogmatics develops into the doctrine of faith in Neo-Protestantism. This description ends with the destruction of the Christian faith through the radical criticism of religion and the discovery of this worldview as a new faith in the second half of the nineteenth century.

For the Chinese context, a historical account of the concept of faith in the history of European philosophy and theology is relevant. Two questions arise here: 1) What are the similarities between the conceptual-historical genesis of “faith” in the European cultural context and that of its Chinese counterpart xin 信? 2) What aspects of the meaning of “faith” in the Judeo-Christian tradition have been taken over or transferred into the Chinese term xin in the past four centuries through cultural exchange in the form of missionary activity, knowledge transformation, translation, etc.? This chapter shall make a first step in providing starting points from a Western conceptual history perspective.

2 In Ancient Philosophy

Discussions about faith have a long tradition in Western intellectual history— this is true in profane language, not just in religious life.² This double usage can already be observed in ancient Greece, although the word πίστις is there mainly used in a non-religious context and only became a technical term in the philosophical language. Among Pre-Socratic philosophers, the concept of faith has two meanings: on the one hand, faith (πίστις) is loyalty, one of the human virtues; on the other hand, in the epistemological-metaphysical context, faith means evident certainty in contrast to doubt.³

This changes with Plato and Aristotle. Plato also uses the term faith (πίστις) in the epistemological-metaphysical context. However, for Plato faith (πίστις) is in no way related to certainty. Instead, he uses it to refer to a kind of knowledge that is superior to probability. According to Aristotle, πίστις is primarily a rhetorical means of persuasion that leads beyond mere opinion. This is then surpassed by logos, which serves as a reasoned definition of an object. This is why Aristoteles—like Plato—also conceives of it as a lesser form of cognition. Apart from this epistemological-metaphysical meaning of faith, in Aristotle’s ethics, faith also comes into consideration as personal reliability—as fidelity, a virtue—and is regarded as a precondition for firm friendship. The profane use of faith in antiquity also includes this term in legal language. In this legal sense, the word gains the meaning of guarantee and security and can therefore refer to the oath of allegiance, legal evidence, and surety.⁴

Apart from these considerations of the expression “faith” in its profane use—in the context of philosophical language (in the epistemological- metaphysical context and in the ethical context) and in the language of the law—the word πίστις already plays a role in religious life in antiquity. In this linguistic area not yet influenced by Jewish or Christian religion, the expression πίστις or πιστεύειν is connected to the speech of gods or goddesses, but not yet in religious language. Theognis of Megara (570 BC–485 BC), for example, understands the personified πίστις as a “great goddess.” Plato also describes the verb πιστεύειν as “being convinced of the existence of the gods,” but he does so in his discussion about the probability of the existence of the gods. It does not refer to a religious or personal relationship between humans and God as we find it later in Christianity. The same is the case for the Stoics.⁵

Compared to its profane use—first and foremost in the language of philosophy—discussion of faith in the religious life of antiquity was not prominent. Correspondingly, during that period, word formations with πίστις or πιστεύειν did not become terms of religious language. With the advance of Christianity into the world of late antiquity, the Greek term πίστις (“faith”) was increasingly understood in the sense of biblical language. However, questions regarding the term “faith” in pre-Christian philosophy played a formative role throughout the history of theology.

3 In the Biblical Tradition

The terminological use of “faith” in the biblical tradition is a highly complex issue. For a long time, most researchers believed that “it is not possible to fall back on an understanding of faith that is already available in the Bible, but rather that the biblical testimonies are to be seen as stages in the formation of faith.”⁶ Rudolf Bultmann (1959) also views the statement in the Old Testament about faith in its theological use as “not first and foremost.”⁷ The most recent research shows, however, that the Old Testament already comprised a rich understanding of faith connected with the root אמן in its original form Hiphil, both in profane language use and in religious or theological usage.⁸

As an Old Testament concept of faith, the word אמן (Hiphil) occurs in its profane usage almost as often as in its theological usage.⁹ In the Old Testament, the profane language use of אמן (Hiphil) is older than the theological use, with the former also strongly influencing the latter. In its profane use, the word אמן (Hiphil) is often used in response to statements made by the subject. Here, the subject is at the center and his or her statements are judged. This results in trust or distrust. This use can already be seen in Genesis: “So they went up out of Egypt and came to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan. They told him ‘Joseph is still alive! In fact, he is ruler of all Egypt.’ Jacob was stunned; he did not believe them.” (Gen 45:25–26) In this context, the intertwining of trust and judgment plays a central role. אמן (Hiphil) is considered to be trust in the judgments. Since trust in judgment is based, to be more precise, on positive judgment, plausibility is decisive for faith or unbelief. In this usage, אמן (Hiphil) as a concept of faith is characterized by the close connection between holding true (positive judging) and trust. The reaction to empirical experience also belongs to this use of the word אמן (Hiphil) in the Old Testament, where appearance serves as a method of persuasion.¹⁰

Apart from its profane usage as a reaction to a statement or empirical experience, the word אמן (Hiphil) is also used in the Old Testament as an evaluation of human beings as well as all other creatures and abstractions. This is the second frequent profane use of this word. Judgment plays a central role here as well: Trusting in a human being presupposes a judgment about his situation, behavior or capacity for insight. What fundamentally distinguishes the profane use of אמן (Hiphil) in the Old Testament from its theological use is the legitimacy of skepticism in faith. This is connected with the fact that the word אמן (Hiphil) in the Old Testament in its profane use often appears in a negated form. Non-belief—including skepticism, mistrust, or doubt—is thus permitted in the inner-worldly context in the Old Testament.

The theological use of אמן (Hiphil) in the Old Testament likely appeared later than the profane use of language and has developed from it. However, this religious or theological use has its own characteristics in linguistic usage. These characteristics are outlined below. In the theological use, אמן (Hiphil) as an Old Testament concept of faith is firstly characterized by the fact that the word describes man’s relationship to God, to Moses as God’s mediator, or to the prophets. The person as subject is thus no longer central: Instead, the focus in this use is God, or Moses and the prophets. Thus it is also said in Genesis: “Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.” (Gen 15:6) Secondly, the theological use of אמן (Hiphil) probably has a similar structure to its profane use: Faith and judgment belong together. However, in this context the word אמן (Hiphil) often serves to judge statements about faith in God, in Moses, or in the prophets. Profane use often involves a concrete judgment of a concrete statement, often in a negated use of the word. Non-belief—including skepticism, mistrust or doubt—is legitimate in this use. On the other hand, the theological use of אמן (Hiphil) in the Old Testament is usually about a basic attitude towards God: either a deep connection to God (and to Moses or to the prophets) or a fundamental refusal, in the case of unbelief.¹¹ This is connected with a third point. In the context of the descriptions of the basic attitude towards God, the use of אמן (Hiphil) as an Old Testament concept of faith is characterized by the contrast of openness to God or closedness. Faith means a basic attitude of openness to God; being closed towards God results in unbelief. The role of Moses in this context is interesting. In many places in the Old Testament, where there is no sign of being closed to God, the miraculous signs that God provides Moses as a mediator immediately lead to faith.¹² Through Moses, too, closedness to God can become openness.¹³ Fourthly, as a further character of the theological use of faith in the Old Testament, it can be pointed out here that the basic meaning of the term אמן (Hiphil) can be interpreted with two opposing groups of meaning—fear and trust. Rudolf Bultmann (1959) points out that fear and trust in this context are “two fundamentally different, indeed opposite groups of meaning.”¹⁴ With the meaning of fear of God, the transcendence of God is emphasized in the concept of faith. Through fear of God, the theological use of the concept of faith is again different from its profane use, whereby no meaning of fear is contained in the concept of faith. According to Bultmann, these two groups of meaning are balanced in the Old Testament. In addition to the basic meanings of trust and fear, the concept of faith in the Old Testament in its religious use through the related terms of אמן (Hiphil) still contains the following meanings: hope (hoping for God’s salvation or for God’s word), waiting (waiting for God), acknowledging (acknowledging God as God), obeying (obeying God), and faithfulness (remaining faithful to God).¹⁵

So far, we have sketched out the profane and theological language use of אמן (Hiphil) as an Old Testament concept of faith in view of the latest research. This brief presentation shows that with the root אמן (in the base form Hiphil) a versatile concept of faith had already been developed in the Old Testament. However, we should point out here that it is difficult to make such a distinction between the profane and theological use of אמן (Hiphil) in some Old Testament texts. The Old Testament use of אמן (Hiphil) in the profane and theological sense has a profound influence on the understanding of faith in Christian theology.¹⁶

The Old Testament heritage of the understanding of faith in its theological use, both its structure characterized by the intertwining of trust and judgment and the various facets of the meaning, was adopted in later Judaism.¹⁷ How- ever, the use of the concept of faith in Judaism also has its own emphasis. An important difference from the Old Testament is that in the later Jewish tradition, the unity of faithfulness and obedience stands at the forefront of the understanding of faith. In Judaism, to be faithful to God and to obey God means that man is in obedient faithfulness to God’s command. Through the canonization of tradition in “Scripture,” obedient faithfulness furthermore gains “the character of obedience to the law.” Thus, in Judaism, faith in God means at the same time remaining in obedient fidelity to the law. For this reason, the term “faith” is often used in parallel to the term “keeping commandments.” Moreover, the meaning of “hope” in the Old Testament understanding of faith is directed here at the supernatural eschatological events of the Jewish people.

Regarding its meaning, the New Testament concept of faith (as noun: πίστις; as verb: πιστεύειν) differed only slightly from the Old Testament concept of faith (אמן/Hiphil) in its profane linguistic usage. The noteworthy difference lies in its theological use, although the Old Testament heritage of the understanding of faith in religious use can also be seen in the New Testament. Thus, the theological concept of faith in the New Testament could be regarded on the one hand as a continuation of the Old Testament and Jewish tradition in Early Christianity, and on the other hand as determined by its specifically Christian use. The Old Testament and Jewish tradition of the concept of faith continues in the New Testament, in that both the structure of the understanding of faith in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition (the intertwining of trust and judgment) and its various moments of meaning are asserted in common Christian usage.

Therefore, with the New Testament, the concept of faith experiences a considerable development in its theological use following the emergence of a new religion. This development has resulted in a specifically Christian use of the concept of faith. In the following, this specifically Christian use will be clarified on the basis of six points.

• 1) In its specifically Christian use, the Greek word πίστις is the first to acquire the primary meaning of acceptance of the Christian message (kerygma), namely, acceptance of the proclamation of the Gospel (cf. Rom 10:14–17). In the New Testament as well as in the Old Testament, faith is regarded as monotheistic faith or as faith in God, but through the acceptance of the Christian kerygma, the “faith in Jesus Christ” (πίστις εις Χριστόν Ιησούν) in the New Testament context has been used almost in the same sense as “faith in God.”¹⁸

• 2) Directly connected with this, faith as recognition in a specifically Christian usage also receives a new meaning. While faith as recognition in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition means “to recognize or acknowledge God as God,” there are two recognitions in the New Testament that are fundamental for the Christian faith: The first recognition is that Jesus is recognized as Lord; but the second, of equal value, is that the miracle of his resurrection is also recognized as “true”—“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). The use of the concept of faith in this second recognition as “believing to be true” is already common in the profane use of the Old Testament concept of faith, but the object of believing has changed to a new or broadened content.

• 3) The concept of faith or πίστις, which in the New Testament is indicated primarily by πίστις εις (belief in), signifies a personal relationship with Christ. In this personal relationship, the relationship to God is originally contained. While in the Old Testament context the relationship to God comes about through “faith in God,” the New Testament relationship to God is only possible through faith in Christ or through the acceptance of the Christian kerygma, respectively. Thus, the relationship to Christ in the New Testament has the same factual meaning as the relationship to God.

• 4) By the primary meaning of acceptance of the Christian kerygma, faith in the New Testament context is neither a religious virtue nor a religious merit. While in the Old Testament-Jewish tradition faith can only be regarded as an appropriate attitude towards God, faith in the New Testament is a gift of God’s grace. Faith, therefore, is neither to be won by faithfulness nor to be earned by keeping commandments, but it is the event of God’s coming. Just as Paul writes in the Epistle to the Romans: “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” (Rom 10:17) Faith can therefore only be created through the word from God or through the Gospel from Jesus Christ. The works of the law, as in Judaism, are thus superseded. Thus, the beginning of the Letter to the Romans already states: “Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4).

• 5) In this context, a central theme in Paul’s theology comes to light: the relationship between faith and salvation. Paul believes that eschatological salvation, like faith, is not a reward for religious virtue, but a gift from God. Salvation can only be received in faith or through the acceptance of the Christian kerygma. If one believes in Jesus Christ, one is saved (cf. Rom 10:9). If accepting the Christian kerygma in the New Testament context also means the access to salvation, then faith (πίστις) is also understood as faith in salvation. Thus, the Pauline concept of faith stands in clear contrast to that of Judaism.¹⁹

• 6) The understanding of faith in the Johannine theology of the New Testament is characterized by two central themes. The first theme is the presence of eternal life in faith: Through faith, one emerges from death into true life and is therefore reborn. The difference between life and death is canceled for believers. The second central theme in John’s understanding of faith is the relationship between faith and cognition. According to Johannine theology, cognition—the recognition of the truth—does not surpass faith; rather, faith is completed through cognition. It is the purpose of faith that there should be no qualitative difference between faith and cognition. With Johannine theology, the relation- ship between faith and cognition has become an important topic in Christian theology. Whether this aspect of the New Testament understanding of faith is influenced by ancient philosophy remains a controversial scholarly question.

These elements of meaning of the concept of faith in its specifically Christian usage in the New Testament remain fundamental to Christian doctrine, even though it has developed in various and continuing ways throughout the history of Christianity. Many discussions about the concept of faith in Christian theology can be traced back to these elements of meaning in the New Testament.

4 In the Early Church

In the Early Church, the Christian doctrine of biblical theology enters the phase of dogma formation. The background is the advance of Christianity into the world of late antiquity. In order to confront the challenge in the new environment, the Christian understanding of faith has also developed. The Old Church faces criticism in the encounter of Early Christianity with the Greek philosophy of antiquity, whereby the concept of faith (πίστις) in its profane use of language has an epistemological-metaphysical meaning, e.g., as an evidential certainty in contrast to doubt. The critics accuse Christians of irrational faith. In reaction to this, almost every Church Father and every writer of the Old Church has considered the relationship between faith and cognition. The relationship of faith and cognition has become a fundamental theme of theology in the early churches, so that the concept of faith in the Early Church can only be understood by determining its relationship with cognition.

With the recognition of Christianity as religio licita (permitted religion) in 311, the agreement of Milan in 313, and finally the recognition of Christianity as a state religion in 380, Christianity became Latinized during its expansion in the Roman Empire. The concept of faith of Latin Christianity is therefore strongly influenced by the meanings “trust” and “trustworthiness” of the Latin words credere and fides, but it also has many elements in common with the Greek concept of faith.²⁰ The Early Church father Tertullian (150–220) used the word fides to describe the entire Christian way of life. For Tertullian, faith and knowledge are in conflict: faith does not lead to knowledge, but is itself the truth in contrast to false claims to knowledge. When using fides/credere, Novatian (200–258) and Cyprian of Carthage (210–258) mean Christianity as specifically the true faith in which the Church is united. Ever since the recognition of Christianity as the state religion by Theodosius I. (347–395) in 380, πίστις/fides always clearly equates it with the creed of Christianity. Deviations from the confession of faith are heresies. According to this, the conflict between faith in God and worldly knowledge comes to a head: Faith in God begins where the knowledge (gnosis, γνῶσῐς) of this world ends. Gnosis represents this dualistic understanding of the world. With Clement of Alexandria (150–215) the relationship between faith and knowledge is redefined in the Early Church. In contrast to the dualistic understanding of the world of Gnosis, Clement does not see faith and knowledge as opposites: “There is neither knowledge without faith, nor faith without knowledge … because from faith one comes to knowledge.”²¹ On the one hand, Clement does not consider faith and cognition in one world to be contradictory; on the other hand, faith remains the fundamental precondition for knowledge. For from faith comes knowledge (γνῶσῐς) and right action (πρᾶξις).²²

As one of the greatest scholars of the Church in late antiquity and an important philosopher, Augustine (Augustine of Hippo, 354–630) summarizes the previous discussions about the relationship between faith and cognition in the Western tradition—both pre-Christian philosophy and Christian theology—and develops a systematic understanding of faith. For Augustine, faith (credere) is primarily a way of perceiving invisible things like love and will. If we trust other people in this respect, we should also trust God—that is, believe in God.²³ Under the influence of Neo-Platonism, Augustine sees God as “absolutely simple and therefore perfect Being.”²⁴ From this point of view the knowledge of truth and the knowledge of God are identical for him. In connection with the recognition of Christianity as the universal way of salvation the Christian faith is for him the basis of knowledge. Thus with him it means: “crede, ut intelligas” (believe so that you may understand). With this statement the movement from faith to knowledge has become the main motif of Augustine’s theology.

The problem of authority plays a central role in his discussion about the movement from faith to knowledge. Augustine distinguishes two opposing authorities: divine authority and human authority. The divine authority, which distinguishes faith from mere credulity or subjective opinion, is the true, only certain, and highest authority. Human authority, on the other hand, is a low authority and is usually deceptive. The right and only path to divine authority is faith. Faith transcends worldly reason and human capacity and enables insight with true reason (ratio, intellegere). For Augustine, therefore, only Christian faith makes true knowledge or truth possible; faith is the starting point for true knowledge. However, not everyone is able to ascend to true knowledge via simple faith. For the faith of ordinary Christians, therefore, the authority of the Early Latin Church speaks above all. Based on divine authority, Christianity is the philosophy and the universal way of salvation for everyone who believes.²⁵

To sum up: Against the historical background of the recognition and privileging of Christianity as state religion in the Roman Empire, with the identification of the Christian faith as the right and only way to divine authority and finally with the determination of the Christian faith as starting point for true recognition, Augustine de facto dismissed the actual differences between the profane and theological language and the concept of faith in the Early Church. His understanding of faith has a profound meaning in Christian theology as well as in Western philosophy.

5 In the Middle Ages

After Christianity had conquered the Roman Empire, the religion continued to spread in Europe. The rest of Europe was already Christianized in the Early Middle Ages. During the long period of the Middle Ages, the Latin Church experienced the further development of Christian doctrine since the time of the Gospel and the Church Fathers. Christian doctrine in the Middle Ages is above all influenced by the way of thinking and method of scholasticism that has the examination of Aristotle’s philosophy as its starting point. Faith and its relationship with cognition are the fundamental themes of medieval theology. On the one hand, the previous understanding of faith in Christian doctrine was deepened and developed further in the Middle Ages; on the other hand, it gained its own development in the process: The Christian faith of the medieval church is not only described and substantiated as a path to true knowledge of God, but also as a path to a fulfilled, meaningful life. Numerous scholastic theologians and philosophers made further contributions to this development of the understanding of faith in the Middle Ages. In the following, the medieval understanding of faith is briefly described through its representatives in three historical phases of the period (Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages).

As the founder of scholasticism and as the main representative of the Early Middle Ages, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) primarily continues the discussion on the relationship between faith and cognition in the Early Church. He revises the Augustinian motif “crede, ut intelligas” (believe so that you may understand) to “credo, ut intelligam” (I believe in order to understand) and then turns it into a programmatic theological method: “fides quaerens intellectum”—faith seeking understanding. With this method, Anselm strives for a rationally transparent content of faith. Man can only come to faith by gaining a kind of preliminary understanding of it through the proclamation of faith.²⁶ The absence of contradiction between reason and faith is the basic principle in Anselm’s theology. Because reason reaches the content of faith by itself, for Anselm un-belief means un-reason. This basic principle is later intensified by his well-known proof and conclusion in the argumentation about the existence of God. Belief in God presupposes the understanding of faith (intellectus fidei) and therefore does not contradict human understanding.

With Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the main representative of high scholastic theology and philosophy, the understanding of faith was further developed in the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s thoughts spread in the High Middle Ages. Against this background, his reception plays an important role in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. In his understanding of faith, Aquinas tried above all to achieve a harmonious combination of ancient philosophy with Christian theology. For Thomas, faith is “a speculative-intellectual agreement to the truths of faith, which is effected by the will.”²⁷ God is seen as “guarantor of the truths of faith.”²⁸ The natural reason of man—especially Aristotelian philosophical thought—plays a decisive part in clarifying the secrets of faith. Therefore, there is no contradiction between ancient philosophy and Christian dogmatics, but rather a harmonious synthesis. In this context, Thomas distinguishes two sources of knowledge: reason and revelation. There is also no contradiction between the knowledge of reason and that of revelation. He now distinguishes two paths in faith: maiores and simplices. One elite group of people can develop their natural reason in such a way as to reach the truths of faith or to discover God (maiores); the other group can only reach this step by faith in God and the revelation of God (simplices)—the most people belong to this group. The two paths to truths of faith complement each other. However, Thomas clearly points out that the second path for ordinary people is a shortened but secure path in faith. With his discussion about the synthesis of reason and revelation, Thomas Aquinas makes a groundbreaking contribution to Christian theology.

In the Late Middle Ages, the Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus (1266– 1308) took the previous discussion of scholasticism about faith and its relation with cognition one step further. Duns Scotus combines the teachings of Aristotle, Augustine, and the Franciscans and differentiates the two paths in faith more precisely than Thomas Aquinas. He distinguishes between infused faith (fides infusa) and acquired faith (fides acquisita): Infused faith, which is also called the revealed faith, can only be attained by God’s will and grace and therefore cannot be experienced, it is supernatural and possesses an immediate certainty; in contrast, acquired faith can be experienced because this faith can be acquired through natural reason. However, the acquired faith must come together with the infused faith, because only through this does the will of God come into being. Every act of faith is therefore a combination of the infused and acquired faith. With Duns Scotus, doubt becomes an important topic in the theological discussion about faith. Since doubt about the acquired faith is possible, faith and doubt cannot be absolutely mutually exclusive.²⁹

6 In the Reformation

With Martin Luther (1483–1546), Christianity in the sixteenth century not only experienced a reformation of the church as an institutional organization, but also a radical change in its theology. Reformation theology is shaped by the fact that faith is a key concern of the Reformation, because Reformation focuses all theological facts on faith. For this reason, Martin Luther’s theology is also called the “Theology of Faith.” However, the focus on the theological facts in faith does not mean that the Reformation further develops and specifies the definitions of the concept of faith in the Early Church and in the Middle Ages, but that the Reformation actually leads to a radical change in the understanding of Christian belief.

The starting point of Martin Luther’s theology consists in the fact that the Gospel as encouragement and as promise is the sole foundation of faith and remains its counterpart. For Luther the source of Christian faith is thus not doctrine or dogma, but the oral proclamation of the Gospel. In this starting point, Luther already sharply distances himself from the scholastic concept of faith by attaching special importance to the question how it had been used in in the New Testament. According to his opinion, faith has two organs: hearing and conscience (fides ex auditu, “faith comes from hearing”). Hearing and conscience are thus the prerequisites for faith: While Luther’s hearing is the external organ of human beings for receiving the oral proclamation, conscience—the inner organ for faith—serves on the one hand as a place of inner receptivity for the proclamation of the Gospel, and on the other hand as a place where every person can and must agree to God’s verdict of guilt. With the determination of hearing and conscience as organs of faith, the importance of the role of the subject in faith preference is revealed. This is a decisive step in the history of theology: The close connection between faith and subjectivity has been a fundamental topic of philosophical and theological discourse on religion since the early modern period in Europa, and the course for this focus was already set in the Reformation period.

The relationship to God is a central theme in Luther’s understanding of faith. Unlike some scholastic theologians, who believe faith to be acquired through the natural reason of human beings, Luther considers faith only as “the work and power of God.”³⁰ For faith alone determines the relationship to God: “If you believe, you have [sc. the relationship to God].”³¹ Against all belief in authority in the Early Church and in the Middle Ages, Luther rests faith only on the mere word of God, namely on the proclamation of the Gospel. In this context, it also redefines humanity’s relationship with Christ. The union of man with Christ does not take place in the sacrament, but only verbally: Salvation depends on the Word through faith, which is only possible through hearing and conscience.

At this point, it is important to know that Reformation Lutheranism and Calvinism differed in their understandings of faith. While Martin Luther understood only the Gospel as the Word of God and determined the oral proclamation as the only source of faith, John Calvin (1509–1564) equated law and the Gospel in their revelatory value. For him, both are the Word of God and therefore the source of the Christian faith.

By turning away from the scholastic determinations of the concept of faith, by his rehabilitation of the Christian use of the concept of faith in the New Testament, and finally by his discovery of the role of the subject in the execution of faith, Martin Luther became a decisive figure in the history of theology and made his radical contribution to the Christian understanding of faith.³² With the discovery of the role of the subject in the preference for faith, the Reformation also marked a dividing line in the history of ideas: it marked the end of medieval philosophy and the beginning of the modern age.³³

7 In Post-Reformation Philosophy and Theology

In post-Reformation theology and philosophy, the concept of faith can be characterized by two features. First, after the Reformation the discussion of faith is characterized by the fact that the secularization of Western society leads to a separation from the theological and profane language of the concept of faith. The second characteristic of the new development of the understanding of faith after the Reformation consists in the fact that the postulate of subjectivity in the preference for faith emphasized by Martin Luther on the path from modern times to the Enlightenment has not only found its conceptual-systematic form but has also reached a climax.

In Enlightenment theology, faith is detached from its relation to the Word of God and understood as assurance of truth analogous to reason. This turn is above all due to the modern discussion in philosophy about the relationship between faith and reason. While Francis Bacon (1561–1626) still sees the contradiction between faith, which is based on authority, and reason, which makes philosophical thinking possible, René Descartes (1596–1650) understands faith and philosophy as different paths to the same result, namely to the truth. With his epistemology, John Locke (1632–1704) has, in the formation of the modern concept of faith, above all contributed to clarifying the relationship between doubt and faith and to discovering the importance of experience of certainty in faith. Although Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) distinguishes between truth revealed by God and truth made accessible by philosophy, he claims the agreement between faith and reason.

Against the background of the modern discussion on the relationship between faith and reason, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the representative of school philosophy in the eighteenth century and the opponent of Halle’s pietism in the early Enlightenment, defines faith in its secularized language as the agreement of a probable sentence. For the Enlightenment philosopher, the independence of human reason is of great importance for faith. With Christian Wolff, reason is opposed to faith in God and science to theology, so that the Enlightenment is seen as a “conflict of authority between reason and faith.”³⁴ In the debate with the philosophy of Enlightenment the main problem of Enlightenment theology is finally that “faith is asserted as something reasonable and theology as natural.”³⁵

The postulate of subjectivity in the preference for faith, as emphasized by Martin Luther, reached a climax in the Enlightenment, which culminated in Kantian transcendental epistemology. In the context of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his religious treatise Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793/94), distinguished between the historical church faith and the bare rational faith. The historical church faith, which is also called the revelation faith, is based on a holy scripture; the rational faith as “pure moral faith” arises from the need of pure reason for morality and is what religion actually is. Thus, Kant identifies rational faith with true religious faith. He argues that historical church faith is to pass over into the pure religious faith, because only by this the randomness of the historical church faith can be abolished and the true church be made possible. As Kant says: “Church faith has pure religious faith as its highest interpreter.”³⁶ With Kant’s philosophy of religion, the subjectivity of the believer moves even further into the foreground of the theological discussion on faith.

8 The Understanding of Faith in Neo-Protestantism

In the transition from Enlightenment theology to Neo-Protestantism, Christian dogmatics becomes doctrine of faith (Glaubenslehre). This new development in theology can be understood as a reaction of Protestantism to the challenge of Enlightenment philosophy. Theology was no longer concerned with a knowledge about God. Theological conflicts are ultimately about faith. However, theological discussions do not only revolve around the question of how the Christian faith can be reinterpreted, but also of how it can be correctly appropriated, communicated and lived.³⁷ Since then, faith has not only received its systematic place in theology, but also become the main topic of theology. Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten (1706–1757) was the first German theologian to call his Christian dogmatics the Evangelische Glaubenslehre (3 volumes, Halle 1759–1760). After Baumgarten, numerous theologians and philosophers have contributed to the reinterpretation of the faith. Friedrich Schleiermacher made the most important contribution to this topic since the Enlightenment, so that today no discussion of the concept of faith in Christian theology and religion theory is possible without him.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the most important theoretician of religion in the Protestant cultural context, interpreted the essence of religion in a revolutionary new manner with his early Romantic religious treatise On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799).³⁸ In order to save religion from its demise at the end of the eighteenth century, Schleiermacher’s new version of the understanding of religion in his Speeches aimed primarily at differentiating religion from other capabilities in human intellectual life or from other areas of culture. In a critical distance to rationalism and orthodoxy, he redefines the essence of religion: It is neither thinking nor acting, but the intuition and feeling of the universe.³⁹ Through this differentiation, Schleiermacher by no means views religion as an epiphenomenon of metaphysics and morality, but rather as an irreplaceable and unmistakable counterweight in the culture to these two. Religion has its own psychological and empirical place in human intellectual life. With this redefinition of the concept of religion, Schleiermacher makes it clear that without reference to the subjectivity of human beings, religion as an act of faith cannot be understood.

Against the background of this new understanding of religion and by critically revising his own thoughts, Schleiermacher in his so-called Glaubenslehre (The Christian Faith)—published under the title Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (1821/ 22; 1830/31)⁴⁰—presents a new understanding of faith. In this work, his systematic presentation of Christian dogmatics, Schleiermacher understands religious faith as a feeling of piety. In its demarcation between knowledge and action, piety is a “modification of Feeling or of immediate self-consciousness.”⁴¹ In his closer discussion, he then identifies the feeling of piety with the feeling of absolute dependency. Upon this basis, Schleiermacher understands the Christian religion as a particular form of communal piety, inwardly as a developed way of faith. As a special way of faith, Christianity or the Christian faith is one of the teleological directions of piety, and this monotheistic way of faith is essentially distinguished from the others by the fact that “in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”⁴²

With his The Christian Faith, the accent on the subjectivity of human beings is even more clearly expressed in religious faith. However, locating the concept of subjectivity in the understanding of faith does not mean that Schleiermacher overlooks the role of the church in religious faith. On the contrary, the social-philosophical dimension belongs to his religious understanding of faith. For Schleiermacher, the intersubjective communication between believers plays an important role in religious faith. The church is “a communion or association relating to religion or piety.”⁴³ As a free religious community, the church serves as a place for individuals to mutually communicate their religious faith.

As already mentioned, the discussion of faith after the Reformation is also characterized by the fact that the secularization of Western society leads to a separation between the theological and profane use of the concept of faith. Since the Enlightenment, many philosophers and theologians have interpreted the concept of faith more closely in its profane language, e.g., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in his well-known writing Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen) (first published in 1802).⁴⁴ Here knowledge and faith are synonymous in the sense of certainty of faith, when reason is “faith” in light of the truth of immediate knowledge. Thus, Hegel attempts not only to transfer faith into knowledge, but also to philosophically generalize Christian faith in the Augustinian-Reformatory tradition. The situation is similar with Schleiermacher. Beyond his influential understanding of faith in the theory of religion and in Neo-Protestantism, he discussed this concept also in his lectures on Philosophical Ethics, which scholars today read as a philosophy of culture, in a secularized linguistic usage. In this philosophy of culture, Schleiermacher interprets the spectrum of human culture as an organization structured by four spheres of action. In each of these spheres of action, people have different relationships to one another. In this scheme, language and knowledge belong to the sphere of action of identical symbolization. Schleiermacher understands the relationship of individual human beings among themselves in this sphere of action as the relationship of faith (das Verhältnis des Glaubens). This relationship of faith is mutually dependent because it is based on mutual understanding structured by pronouncing and reproducing or by teaching and learning the language.⁴⁵

9 The Old and New Faith: Farewell to Religious Belief

In the context of the secularization of Western society since the Enlightenment, the theological and the profane usage of the concept of faith were separated and the concept of faith in its profane usage defined in greater detail in German idealism, as with Hegel and Schleiermacher. However, this new development did not lead to an elimination of religious faith. In the course of the nineteenth century, it became a subject of philosophy and theology. The reason for this is not only the shaping of the new forms of radical criticism of religion, especially by Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, but also the development of the natural sciences (e.g., Darwinism) and the historical sciences. The discussion in theology about faith in this phase is characterized by the clear contrast of the Christian faith and the modern worldview.

With his famous work The Essence of Christianity (1841),⁴⁶ Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) presents a radical criticism of religion based on German idealism whereby religious faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition is anthropologically destroyed. Based on the Hegelian theory of consciousness and the concept of the absolute spirit, Feuerbach understands religion as the unconscious “self-consciousness which man has of his nature.”⁴⁷ Religion is indeed the consciousness of the infinite, but it is not different from man’s consciousness of his infinite nature as a generic species—as human being.⁴⁸ Accordingly, for Feuerbach theology is only anthropology: “The beginning, middle and end of Religion is MAN.”⁴⁹ Thus, religion, especially the Christian religion, is only the behavior of a person toward himself or herself, or more precisely, toward his or her own nature as human being.⁵⁰ Religion results in the disuniting of man from himself. In this anthropological criticism of religion, Feuerbach identifies man’s own infinite being as the content of faith with the absolutely infinite or God. Thus, the belief in God means merely the belief in the infinite essential nature of human being. This leads finally to the fact that the faith content of the Christian religion and the monotheism is secularized, in the other words: The absoluteness of the religious faith content is negated. Feuerbach’s anthropological destruction of religious faith has a profound significance, because all relevant criticism of religion after Feuerbach has built on its basic ideas.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) also regarded Feuerbach’s criticism of religion as a prerequisite and starting point. Nevertheless, Marx distances himself from Feuerbach and sets his own accents on the basis of his materialistic philosophy of history. While Feuerbach understands religion anthropologically as the self-consciousness of the infinite human nature, Marx finds the genesis of religion primarily in the political-economic reality of society.⁵¹ For the human being is absolutely a social being—in the family or in the state. For Marx, religion is none other than “the expression of real suffering” and “a protest against real suffering” in society:⁵² religion, from its genesis, is the critique of society. Thanks to its stabilizing function in society, religion is only a kind of “self-anaesthetization”—“the opium of the people.”⁵³ Against this backdrop, Marx—along with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)—later presents a conviction in the ideal of a classless society.⁵⁴ In doing so, he not only made it clear again that religious faith must be overcome and brought to an end through revolutionary societal change. At the same time, he presented also socialism, the ideal of a classless and just society, as an alternative to capitalism. In contrast to religious faith, the belief in socialism acts as a form of secular belief during the labor movement since the late nineteenth century in Europe. Socialism, the ideal of the classless and just society on “this side,” serves as the concrete content of the secular belief. Together with Karl Marx’s criticism of religion and his concept of socialism, this belief in socialism has been widely received, contextualized, and instrumentalized in the use of language in China since the beginning of the twentieth century.⁵⁵

Moreover, the concept of “worldview” became central in the discussion on faith in the nineteenth century, with the destruction of Christian faith by the radical criticism of religion, so that the theological debate on it at this stage is characterized by the contraposition of the Christian faith and the worldview. The concept of worldview is not a new word in the philosophical and theological history of Europe.⁵⁶ However, the fact that “worldview” was emphasized as a subject of theology and then still explicitly as a competitor and alternative to Christian faith is the case only in the second half of the nineteenth century. First and foremost, this can be attributed to the German theologian and philosopher David Friedrich Strauß.

Like Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauß (1808–1874) initially developed his interpretation of Christian faith on the basis of German idealism, especially Hegelian. Different from Feuerbach, the progress of the natural sciences and materialism in the nineteenth century played a decisive role in the further development of Strauß’s thoughts. Already in his early work, The Christian Doctrine of Faith (1840/41),⁵⁷ Strauß states that ecclesiastical doctrine should be ultimately dissolved by rationalism and that Christian faith can only be understood by a speculative-philosophical interpretation in the sense of Hegel, since according to Strauß, Christian religion cannot be reconciled with modern science.

While Strauß remained cautious in this early work and did not dare to bring the Christian faith to the end, he takes a decisive step with his last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (The old faith and the new) (1872),⁵⁸ programmatically replacing the old Christian faith with a new faith, a contemporary worldview. In doing so, he not only abandons his Hegelianism and abolishes Christian faith bound to Scripture and church dogma, but he also constitutes knowledge, a modern worldview shaped by Darwinism and materialism, as a new faith. This “new faith” is based on the results of scientific research as well as on the materialism brought about by industrialization in the nineteenth century. In this new faith, the world is no longer understood as God’s creation—“the work of a reasonable and good creator,”⁵⁹ but as a place of production of human beings for a good purpose—“the laboratory of the reasonable and good.”⁶⁰ Strauß describes the modern worldview as “the result painfully educed from continued scientific and historic research, as contrasted with that from Christian theology.”⁶¹ He understands this worldview, the “new faith,” now as an alternative and antithesis to the “old” Christian faith. Therefore, according to Strauß’s conviction, the old Christian faith stands in indissoluble contraposition to the worldview, a new faith with the profane content of faith in natural sciences and materialism. Strauß personally bids farewell to the old faith and professes the new faith. With his programmatic work, he resolves the vigorous debate about a substitution of the Christian faith identified with an ancient worldview by the contemporary worldview. Theology and religious studies worldwide have been forced to continue to deal intensively with this debate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Though we have no proof for a direct reception of Strauß’s writings, the rhetorics of “new faith” is found also in the 1920s in China.⁶²

10 Conclusion

Through an overview of the history of ideas, we have explored the range of meanings of the term “faith” in the history of European philosophy and theology—both in its religious and theological as well as its non-religious use up to the nineteenth century. An overview is too short to show the full complexity of the meaning of the concept of faith. However, it allows at least a glimpse of how multilayered the concept of faith is in Western traditions. This complexity turns up in multiple fields, such as religious-historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical ones. This brief historical account shows how the concept is not only a historical product of influences from different geographic or linguistic traditions, but even more the product of interactions between different religious ideologies and philosophical schools.

From antiquity to the history of Early Christianity, the history of ideas characterizes the concept of faith through three traditions: ancient Greek philosophy (πίστις), the Old Testament Jewish tradition (אמן/Hiphil) and the New Testament innovation of “faith in Jesus Christ” (πίστις εις Χριστόν Ιησούν). Although the theological concept of faith in the New Testament is considered to be a continuation of the Old Testament Jewish tradition in Early Christianity, it is defined by its specifically Christian use. The ancient Greek concept of faith has a strong non-religious language use—in epistemological-metaphysical, ethical, and juridical contexts—and does not entail terms of religious language. The influence of the ancient Greek concept of faith on the use of this term in the biblical tradition is not yet evident in Early Christianity. Within the history of theology, the formative role of the ancient concept of faith has only been evident since the Early Church. With the advance of Christianity into the world of late antiquity, not only the Greek concept of faith (πίστις), but also the Roman one (fides/credere) were understood within the linguistic world of the Bible. As Early Christianity encountered Greek antiquity, the epistemological-metaphysical meaning of the ancient concept of faith has provided for criticism of the biblical concept of faith, so that the relationship between faith and cognition has become a fundamental theological topic in the ancient church. A characteristic of the concept of faith in the Early Church is that through the recognition and privileging of Christianity as a state religion in the Roman Empire, the actual difference between the profane and theological use of language in the concept of faith was ultimately de facto dismissed by Augustine. The influence of ancient philosophy is even more evident in the Middle Ages. Thanks to the spread of Aristotle’s ideas, faith and knowledge remain the central theme in scholastic theology and philosophy, and the discussion about the relationship between faith and reason, between reason and revelation, and between faith and doubt also moved to the center of the debate.

The concept of faith in modern times is not only connected with the church renewal or Martin Luther’s Reformation or with the progress of modern philosophy, but also with the development of society. By turning away from scholastic determinations, Martin Luther rehabilitated the specifically Christian use of the concept of faith in the New Testament. Luther’s contribution also consists in his discovery of the role of the subject in the execution of faith. Accordingly, faith and subjectivity become a central theme in the understanding of faith. The secularization of Western society in modern times leads to a separation between the theological and profane language in the concept of faith. In the Enlightenment, the debates over the interrelation between faith and reason are marked by the conflict of authority over truth. As a result, the believer’s subjectivity moves even further into the foreground of the discussion. As a continuation of this development, Christian theology in Neo-Protestantism becomes the doctrine of faith (Glaubenslehre).

The genesis of the concept of faith in the European cultural context is in fact a dynamic process: The term continually appropriates new accents and new facets of meaning in different phases and is finally expanded in Neo-Protestantism in a theologically and philosophically developed system. This development in the history of the concept is seen as a constant appropriation of new facets on the one hand and as intellectual continuity on the other. These characteristics of the Western concept of faith—its complexity of meaning and as the historical product of a dynamic process—not only occur in the history of European philosophy and theology—this is also the case for its Chinese counterpart xin 信.

This history of Western semantics also becomes relevant when we will look at its later receptions in China in different stages. Not in all stages all possible Western aspects of meaning were received—since there is no one Western meaning of the term faith, as this chapter has clearly demonstrated. Instead, it will be important to see how different facets were received through specific channels of transfer in specific times under specific conditions. This overview therefore marks different starting points for such receptions. In particular, we will see—and should be aware of—that the first reception of Christianity in form of Jingjiao 景教 (Church of the East, or so-called Nestorian Church) in the period around 635–846 (in the Tang Dynasty) would, of course, have brought with it neither connotations of fides of the Western Latin church (contemporary or later) nor ideas of the Lutheran Reformation, with its central focus on Glaube. Even linguistically, it is instead rooted in Syriac (semitic) church language traditions not touched upon here. For later periods it is, however, obvious how the Jesuits brought ideas to China that were based on their Catholic scholastic orthodoxies (harmonizing faith and reason). Protestantism finally made a contribution to this reception rather later through pietist and liberal interpretations of faith. These concepts were not only bound to the monotheistic Christian God, but also emphasized faith as a faculty of personal religious experience. Secular interpretations since the nineteenth century have again built on these interpretations and secularized them.

Finally, we would like to hint at the history of reception through translations of the named Western classics which made Western ideas available for readers in modern China (and probably better known to Western readers than ideas of xin). This history begins with the Jesuits in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Thanks to the extensive translation of European philosophical and theological literature into Chinese since the beginning of the twentieth century—and continuing to the present day with book series such as the Hong Kong-based Institute of Sino-Christian Studies’ translation series as a prominent example⁶³—the majority of the ideas and authors presented here are already known in China. From Plato’s theory of ideas to Aristotle’s ethics, from the thoughts of the Early Church fathers to Augustine’s works, from the early scholastic Anselm of Canterbury to the representative of the High Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, from the reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin to numerous philosophers in modern times, from Kant’s Enlightenment religious writings to Schleiermacher’s early Romantic work On Religion, from Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans (1919) to Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope—in Chinese-language literature we could find translations and ideas for almost every phase of European history of philosophy and theology and for every important author, not to mention numerous translations of the Bible. The radical criticism of religion in Europe has also long found its adherents in China. In comparison to the academic discourse (in the field of philosophy, religious studies and theology), the idea of radical criticism of religion (e.g., Feuerbach and Marx) plays a particularly weighty role in the political discourse of the People’s Republic of China, because it is embedded in the state ideology.

However, such knowledge has been so far largely one-sided. The omission of a comprehensive mutual exchange from today is particularly surprising when one notes that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the first intellectual encounter of European-Christian and Chinese traditions through the missionary activity of the Catholic Church resulted in a profound impact on the history of ideas in Europe, and that the transcultural aspect is a central part of the current discussion on faith and religion. Now it is the time for a more systematic introduction of the Chinese genesis of xin as an approximate counterpart for the term “faith” for the Western audience. As a beginning of this exchange, this volume could serve as an open platform for interactive discussion—a kind of transcultural hermeneutics.